Introduction: Mother Tongue as Global Politics

Abstract

For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, “mother tongues” persist as perilous, precarious terrain. Far from being a straightforward linguistic resource or a totalizing, self-evident identity marker, “mother tongue” is always positioned, partial, and political. As a category, “mother tongue” encompasses projects across disparate sites, histories, and interactional grounds beyond South Asia, where the concept has been most extensively elaborated. Articles in this collection trace the links among collective national identities, individuated personhood, and the denotational codes that get made to refract language-community attentions—not just a group's language, but more essentially, their “mother tongue.” What transformations, investments, anxieties, blockages, and affinities are necessary to enable these languages’ continued, ambivalent existence as being as close as one's “mother”? How do raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic performances of personhood come to feel natural through “mother tongues,” especially in cases where the connection (or the language) is constructed as broken, severed, corrupted, or irrevocably lost? Together, we explore mobilizations of “mother tongue” as a technology of commensuration: a tool and technique through which myriad and shifting political claims get made with, through, against, and beyond global projects of value-creation.